How Do I Write Thee? Let Me Count the Words.

Ciao, SEers. Yep, I went the cheesy-route in the title. Hopefully Elizabeth Barrett Browning doesn’t mind me manipulating her masterpiece.

It’s February, the month of love. (If you subscribe to that, which I kind of don’t. I’m a romantic, so I think love is important all the time.)

Anyway, today I want to talk about word counts in fiction. Specifically, definitions of categories, ranges of words, and genre norms.

Word counts are important for both publishing and contest submissions. But breaking things down into categories is always easier than speaking in great yet nebulous generalities. So that’s what publishers did. When people talk about types of fiction, these are the categories and an estimated range of word counts assigned to them.